Daily Business Report: Tuesday, October 28, 2025
While San Diego Leaders Balk at High Rates, City Debates Less-Ambitious Sewage Recycling Plan
By MacKenzie Elmer | Voice of San Diego
In September, the San Diego City Council gave the mayor a month to find ratepayers savings on water rates. Tuesday’s the councilmembers’ second attempt to pass a 63 percent water and 31 percent wastewater increase over four years.
Nothing has changed in the proposal.
And everybody’s pointing fingers. The city’s Public Utilities staff blamed the rate hikeon the region’s water seller – the San Diego County Water Authority – which sells expensive desalination water from a plant in Carlsbad and imported water from the Colorado River. The Water Authority later blamed the city’s massive project to recycle sewage into drinking water, Pure Water, for the higher water rates on all of its customers, in a Union-Tribune article.
California’s gerrymander and generational rift could shake up its Democratic hierarchy
By Dan Walters | CalMatters
Democratic politicians throughout California — those already in office and those who want in — assume that voters will rearrange the state’s 52 congressional districts next month and create new career opportunities.
The assumption is well grounded. A recent CBS News poll found 62% of the state’s likely voters, driven by disdain for President Donald Trump, will enact Proposition 50, a plan to shift five more congressional seats to Democrats even though they already have 43.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s gerrymander would offset pro-Republican redistricting schemes in Texas and other states that Trump seeks to retain, or perhaps expand, the GOP’s paper-thin majority in the House next year.
The Suspected LA Arsonist and the Rise of the Nihilistic Violent Extremists
By Peter Savodnik | The Free Press
Early on January 1, 2025, as everyone else in Los Angeles was still ringing in the new year, Jonathan Rinderknecht hiked into the Santa Monica Mountains and, with his cigarette lighter, allegedly set some paper or brush or both alight. The flames spread and, prosecutors say, became the Lachman fire, which would in turn become the much bigger Palisades fire—the most disastrous blaze in the city’s history.
Rinderknecht was an Uber driver, and he had been “agitated and angry” earlier that night, according to two girls he’d driven around. About what, they couldn’t be sure. It didn’t really matter. By now he was a type, someone who was increasingly familiar to Americans: young, angry, rudderless, very online, very political, but whose agenda was difficult to discern.
